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Thanks for checking this out and for giving so much feedback!

On performance: it's definitely a struggle to work out how much optimisation to put in place at different stages of a project. This build had some culling etc. in place to enable the map building. Gleb [our other programmer] also pushed a hotfix to address an issue where some hybrid laptops were not having their GPU detected by GameMaker. But yeah, the project was not really at a stage of proof where I would be concerned about extended the playtesting reach beyond "hey, play it if you can!". We'll definitely set the settings lower by default in future builds - and do further optimisation. I think a recurring issue we're also going to have is just people expecting any 2D game to run on anything, because they think the job of a GPU is to render realistic 3D graphics... I don't think we're going to escape from that no matter how much we do.

All of your UX/controls feedback is valid. We haven't dropped an update in a few months but the next one with have key rebinding (it's already in, we're just not updating the build until some other stuff is ready as some of the core design has pivotted a lot). I wouldn't necessarily think of myself as console-first, but I do tend to play character/action-driven PC games with a controller, and when it comes to platformers I have a hard time empathising with keyboard players! The next build will have better controls generally - and some of the contextual long-presses will be gone as the teleporter concept is leaving the game in the next stage of design changes. There's also some wonk around the character controller where sprinting momentum doesn't transfer to jumps etc. which is on our list of things to address.

I really appreciate you taking the time to play and I hope if you play the next update it'll work better for you! The only reason it's taking so long is that this was always a strange design and it's only really in the last 2 months that certain aspects of the loop have come together in a way which makes it easier to see what the final game might be. 

One issue we had with some systems was GameMaker wasn't detecting the GPU and was running something else [so higher spec machines weren't actually using their hardware]. I thought we caught that in one of the recent updates but we'll look into it more over the next few months.

At this stage we're still validating the gameplay concept, so getting the game optimised isn't so much of a priority yet. Thanks for trying though. 

All of this is on the "to do" list; thanks.
it's a gameplay prototype to validate what is interesting or fun about the core gameplay, so we are not focussed on catching every small bug at this stage. Thanks for trying it out.

do you have system specs?

We're not really focussed on optimisation at this stage as the gameplay is still being validated, but appreciate you giving it a try either way. 

do you have system specs?

We're not really focussed on optimisation at this stage as the gameplay is still being validated, but appreciate you giving it a try either way. 

new version has the ability to turn off the pixel-art upscaling filter [seemed to be the main culprit in tanking performances on some people's machines]

Thanks for checking it out - we found some issues with "start fullscreen" which were doing some strange stuff to some GPUs... new build is going up in ten minutes. 

Hey - I'll ask the guy who was tech lead but I'm really not sure. We used some template stuff so there's a chance its related to some multiplayer functionality we didn't tear out? I'll look into it

Thanks! Unreal was a bit of a learning curve for both of us, I think.

v0.002. update;

- changed some button-mapping based on initial playtest feedback [still not keyboard compatible yet; making sure things make sense with xbox controller first]
- new build has had some of the late-game content removed; you'll only get grey, green and red rooms and you'll see what the game is like for a player in the early-game.
- new room; "Market". Sell food items you find or make at the gnome wagon. You can also now purchase relics [although you won't know what they do until you own them] This room is an earlier precursor the blue room "Automarket" which is meant to be an upgrade of the Market Gnome. 
new relics allowing you to; survive longer in the void before freezing; punch through mud and fungus; receive coins for defeating enemies. 
- made some optimisations

Thanks for playing! Everything is in place to make the keyboard work, I'm just working out the control mapping for it (still unsure about some of the gamepad inputs and I want to make sure I know what those are before I convert for keys). Shouldn't be long now. 

The art here is charming - although sound would have been nice and would have really doubled-down on the slightly Caste Crashers-y comic art style as well as helping players understand the mechanics (for example a different sound for losing health through damage and a different sound for losing health through max HP bar contraction). I really like the overall concept here and it's a shame I didn't get to play it with another human at the other controls.  

I think for the central mechanical conceit to work, consider making the arena much bigger (4x-5x?) so that there is a lot more leeway, but give players lots of incentive to stray into the middle (e.g. loot etc.).

I want to give this one more stars because it's an interesting abstract "pure gameplay" experiment. It looks visually interesting/exciting in motion and has decent sound implementation that adds to the experience.

However, it's not intuitive at all and lacks any instructions on what I'm meant to be doing. Even once I'd worked it out, I felt like it needed to ease the player in a bit some much slower/easier rounds to get the hang of it. This would also make up for the lack of instructions!

Hey, I feel like the jam theme is only here in the loosest "avoid the danger" kind of way, it would have been nice to see more inventive ways to play with the theme.

That said, this feels like one of the better entries in terms of the fun factor, the gamefeel and audiovisual presentation. The sound and sense of movement are both really slick!

There's some really neat stuff in here.

I definitely felt like I was playing a proof of concept rather than something I could really get my teeth into, and the main reason for this was that the game didn't seem to get harder as it went on.

There was no sound, and the movement was at times a bit janky. I think a better design decision would have been to more clearer and visually "lock down" the rooms each player was in so there was a clear in-world justification for the movement restrictions. That or having some sort of risk-reward aspect where staying close together would drain each character's health until they get a chestburster or something. I really liked that that central room with 3 exits created such a frustrating bottleneck in the middle of the ship!

I really liked the messages from the Captain/whoever; they were a really nice touch and gave a sense of a bigger world outside the game. I also really love games that take something else and simplify it down to a few of its elements, so a sort of loveletter to FTL which only focusses on rushing around repairing stuff is itself a neat idea. 

Yo!

I had fun with this. It's a bit of a literal use of the theme. The art is a bit inconsistent but I really liked the way the items themselves were rendered.

There's no sound and the movement feels a bit sluggish. I think that in a game about avoiding people, you want to tune the movement to make it difficult to avoid people, and this tile-based step-by-step movement makes it feel more like a polite simulator than a game about avoidance.

The likelihood of getting enough people online at once to justify having made this an online experience is quite low, so overall it feels like dev time was sunk into the "technical achievement" part rather than the "make it fun" part?

it's okay.

Sort of reminded me of a David Firth cartoon. 

Great game; visually beautiful and the audio is really menacing.

Really great and playable take on the jam theme. The use of Romeo and Juliet was genius as well; a great way to get lots of pre-written amusing dialogue and backing story in there.

Enjoyable and polished. Although it did seem slightly redundant to use LMB to fire when the position of the mouse meant nothing; maybe that's just me.

Reminds me of an old Windows skiing game I used to play. Well executed although the contrast of the colours made it difficult to play for any length of time.

It's funny that someone else mentioned the Beast games because I really got that vibe off the enemies. Really enjoyed this one, one of the better endless runners in the jam (boy have there been a lot). The shifting between reality and cyberspace feature was a really interesting addition. Particularly loved the background art.

Enjoyed this a lot, it's gone in my "favourites from the jam" collection. I'm not really used to this sort of game, and I don't know how much it fit the theme, but I felt more like I was being involved in a "cyberpunk" world than with a lot of the more shooty/jumpy entries I've played. Remembering the combos was a bit frustrating, and in retrospect I should've used a pad. If you want to make it feel a bit more "gamey" you could incorporate a cocktail recipe book somewhere, and have a countdown after people order; serve it quicker and get a bigger tip; or something like that. Really well written from a dialogue perspective.

I really enjoyed this,  although I eventually had to quit because it was feeling like there was no difficulty ramp. Might be interesting to introduce health pick ups and only restore a smaller portion of health after each boss. Also maybe experiment with mouse aiming for the guns to counter some of the criticisms about the aiming. Really polished and looked great. Occasionally difficult to "read" my ship when explosions were happening in the distance but I have similar issues with a lot of colourful shmups.

Ladders were the most frustrating element (trying to jump onto them without flying off). I liked the fact that the robots just sort of pushed you off ledges instead of killing you; not what you'd expect in a platformer but it made it different. Maybe add in a sort of medal-based, time-attack/race element and it'll feel more gamey.

Oh boy, this was really enjoyable. The eyes scared the hell out of me, and it was really interesting/unsettling to see what happened when I deviated off of the track. Hope you do more with this.

Really fun to play. Tutorial could use some more explanation of how to do everything. But I enjoyed playing it, and I liked the unit build voices :)

Felt really satisfying to control, and will do even more so when you've got vertical movement. I was pleasantly surprised when the chopper came in as the enemies were starting to feel dull. Wasn't much strategy to it apart from running backwards and forwards but hopefully more movement directions will allow for that.

Really interesting. Might work well as a multiplayer board-game-like, perhaps where you don't know who the other players are and where each has a set of two or three goals to achieve.

I really enjoyed this. The hacking minigame is interesting and you actually have to think about it and I loved the camera movement. My only issues were that Tyrell looks like he has ballet shoes, and also the updrafts could be hard to use sometimes, I just felt stuck.

 I was a little confused at first that I wasn't starting on a building. I also noticed that sometimes you will get one building right next to another, so that it feels like there's 4+ rows on the same building, and controlling on a vertical plane feels a bit off (maybe the camera should rotate so that the surface you land on is always horizontal?) But overall I really enjoyed this; the aesthetic is great and it's a good play on the theme so I've rated it quite highly.

I feel like a lot of that intro story exposition time could've been used for a visual tutorial. Having images relating to what you actually do in the game is a lot more useful than a text-only tut...

Enjoyable, will play again. Although I think the rings needed to be a bit brighter.

One of my favourites so far. A really simple mechanic that kept me playing for a lot longer than many of the other games. My only trouble was that at the start I was unsure as to the relevance of the 3 gang member's positions and their relationship to the block/building colours (I'm guessing there wasn't any).

I enjoyed this. A really attractive game. The only thing that put me off was the upwards, non-running jump, which I kept accidentally executing when trying to jump forwards. 

This was really enjoyable to play. One thing I felt was that the middle pink stream was actually more difficult to stay on for a long period of time than the top one. This was because you could avoid things on the top layer but jumping up and over, but doing so one the middle stream automatically takes you up. So maybe the middle stream should've been the most valuable?